2005 Consumer Electronics Show

Microsoft Corporations 2005 New Product Offerings

This is the second year I have witnessed a Microsoft Application/Hardware failure during it's introduction at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This year 2005, Over 120,000 people attended the show and there were 2500 exhibits. It's a million and a half square feet of floor space, making this a very huge event. So you've got to consider that ever exhibitor wants his presentation to be flawless and that it performs the way it did during pre show test. That was not the case for Microsoft Corporation of Redmond Washington.

In this case, the presentation was Microsoft Media Center, the one application that Microsoft is depending on, A key product for forward movement in their benchmark plans for success. It was suppose to be a simple remote control photo slide show display. But it wasn't working. Bill fiddled with the remote for a while to no avail and finally decided to give it up.

Bill turns and look at his technical crew and you knew he was pissed. He just kind of smiled sheeplessly at the crew, and one would think, He's probably thinking to himself, 'somebody is going to pay for this.

Conan O'brien one of the shows host, was talking with Bill when he got word that the tech staff had corrected the technical difficuties.Bill, enthusiastic, picks up the remote again and says lets give that one more try. Guess what? It still did not work. Bill Gates was pissed, you know he had to be, but being the cool billionaire he is, he managed to maintain his professionalism.

In all fairness, people are human and mistakes just happen, but a large corporation like Microsoft with hundreds of talented employees, years of experience and a year between events to prepare for the ultimate presentation (at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show), should never make these kinds of mistakes.

Perhaps, these type of continuing infractions may account for the persistent problems that plague the Windows operating systems.

No one would have ever suspected, not even Bill Gates, that the same very serious problems encountered with the Win95 and Win98 operating systems happened to show up in the demonstration of the XBox 360 at CES. This had to be an extremely embarrassing moment for Bill, because the anomaly just happened to be the Blue Screen of Death. What! Are you kidding? This is a game console supposedly ready for release. Bill, Bill!

This is just fuel for the fire for your critics who love to ridicule your products for unexplained crashes, freezes and security issues. This was definitely not the venue to showcase business as usual with Microsoft's products.

Take a look at Bill's headaches from a positive perspective, He didn't have Microsoft design exclusively for him, error free products and intentionally pass the inferior ones to us. For us, sometimes it's inefficient or lost productivity and frustration, but for Bill, it's total embarrassment.